The Boot

For many years, the relationship between organized labor and Ron Wyden has looked like a match made in heaven. Lately, though, labor has been doing everything short of throwing the kitchen knives at Oregon's senior senator.

The reason is Wyden's health care plan, which he's calling the "Healthy Americans Act." Unions, such as the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), think Wyden's plan would squander the opportunity to enact meaningful reform of our pathetic health care system.
We agree.
On a website it's put up (stopwydenshealthtax.com), AFSCME calls Wyden's idea a "health tax." That's a rhetorical gimmick, sort of like conservatives calling the estate tax "the death tax." But while Wyden's plan wouldn't literally tax health, it would tax health care benefits. And that – especially in a time of falling wages and rising layoffs – is not the way to go.

The Oregon Liquor Control Commission has all the outward appearance of hip, contemporary culture. You can subscribe to the agency's Twitter feed (Here comes an arbitrary fine, Tweet!) or its Blogspot blog where you can learn that 77 percent of Portland area businesses didn't sell to minors, or that 82 percent of Central Oregon merchants passed their client check. But don't let the web wrangling fool you, this is an agency firmly planted in the early 20th Century post-Prohibition era. Nowhere is the agency's Victorian era attitude about alcohol consumption and sales, and its even more troubling strong-arm approach to enforcing that idea, more prevalent than in Central Oregon where the agency has been handing out fines and sanctions like Tequila shots in Cabo.

The magician David Copperfield once made the Statue of Liberty disappear. Oregon's Republican legislators claim they've come up with a trick that's even neater: They can make $3 billion appear.

Bend was flying high on dreams of becoming a hub of the aviation industry in December 2007. Textron Inc.

Ever since Oregon's public records law was passed some 40 years ago, special interests have been nibbling holes in it. This week, with the help of Rep. Judy Stiegler of Bend, the legislature bit off another chunk.

Stiegler issued a press release on Monday talking about her role in the passage of HB 2727, a bill that would create an exemption from the law for information about holders of concealed handgun licenses (CHLs).
Sheriffs in counties across Oregon, including Deschutes, have been simply flouting the public records law and refusing requests by reporters for information about concealed-carry permits. This legislation essentially throws a cloak of legality over what the sheriffs have been doing illegally.

When you fall on hard times, it's always tempting to look for someone other than yourself - your financial adviser, your banker, the brother-in-law who told you to put all your money in GM stock - to blame the fall on. Now that Bend's downtown is hurting, the search for scapegoats is on. The latest candidate: panhandlers.
The Bend City Council has asked City Attorney Mary Winters to look into legal ways that the city can deal with the perceived panhandling problem. This came in response to a complaint from a local merchant who thought people standing out on the sidewalk asking for money could be hurting business.
Some councilors agreed with her, including Tom Greene, who was quoted as saying, "I've had a lot of people say it makes them uncomfortable to go downtown."

"A man's house is his castle," the English jurist Sir Edward Coke declared in 1644.

America's founders put it into more ornate language almost two centuries later: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
Although neither Sir Edward Coke nor the authors of the Bill of Rights had ever heard of automobiles, we're confident that if they had they would have said the inside of somebody's car should be just as secure as his house from unreasonable, warrantless searches.